Well, it’s happened! A lot of what I’ve been working towards for the past 6-7 months has finally come to fruition. I’m excited to introduce AMV Tracker, a program I’ve been writing in that time and which you may remember in its original incarnation as gpGUI. Since I released that back in December, the program has undergone a massive facelift. The source code has basically been entirely rewritten in that time, and while the driving force behind the project was and remains the AMV Genome Project, AMV Tracker is no longer bound to a philosophy that puts the Genome Project at the center of its purpose. In other words, this project has been intentionally expanded to appeal to people who don’t care about the Genome Project but still want to track their AMVs.

Because, that’s what this program has become — a tool for cataloging, rating, and categorizing any AMV you watch. It’s designed to be simple and straightforward, while allowing you to maintain complete control over your database(s) and the information contained within. I wrote this in Python 2.7, using the PyQt4 GUI library, along with xlrd, xlwt, and xlutils for working with the spreadsheets.

Since the alpha release last December, many, many features have been added, and I’ve done my best to make the program as self-explanatory as possible. If it is not immediately obvious what something is/does, you can probably either (a) hover your mouse over it to get a fuller explanation, or (b) click it (if it’s a button) and it will explain its purpose before it does anything. AMV Tracker is a deliberately “safe” program in almost all respects, meaning that it’s going to be really hard to mess anything up without knowing you’re doing so first.

If this sounds the least bit interesting to you, please give it a look! All the details, instructions for use, and a link to the download, can be found here:

If you decide to check this out, PLEASE do me a favor and leave feedback. I don’t care if it’s a single word like “cool” or a 10-page dissertation on why it sucks, just knowing that people are interested is awesome. I’ll be continuing to develop this further in the coming months, as well; the next planned major update will feature all sorts of statistical analysis tools for analyzing the data contained in your database, but if anyone asks for features, I’m all ears and would be happy to entertain any and all ideas you might have! I really want to move the Genome Project from a one-man operation to include anyone in the community who’s even slightly interested, and this is the next big step in that direction. If you have ideas on how to improve this program, PLEASE tell me!

Thank you for reading, and hopefully also for checking out AMV Tracker!